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Crystal & Daniel

Are Getting Married!

Cypress, TX

2.27.2021

About Us

In August of 2014 at the University of North Carolina, Crystal began her graduate studies in Biostatistics and met Daniel, who had entered the same program the year before she did. They took little to no notice of one another despite being in the same research group and having neighboring desks. One year later, being the former high school choir nerd that she is, Crystal enrolled in voice lessons and was in need of an accompanist. Lucky for her, labmate Daniel was quite the talented pianist. It wasn’t long before Crystal and Daniel were regularly headed out to practice rooms for jam sessions with music genres ranging from opera and musical theatre to pop.

An entire year later, Crystal and Daniel discovered another shared passion: street tacos. By now, Crystal realized she had a pretty big crush on Daniel. That evening, Daniel and Crystal found themselves headed out for some spontaneous late night tacos. Now on the one hand, this was excellent news. Was Daniel interested? Maybe! On the other hand, Crystal had just eaten a massive burrito for dinner and had little to no appetite for any more food for perhaps another 4.5 days. But she couldn’t back out now! After (begrudgingly) eating just one taco, Crystal and Daniel spent about four hours in the university quad playing guitar and singing duets. Can you say “dreamy?” When they finally went home, Crystal was on cloud 9, and Daniel thought to himself “Wow, I just spent a pretty long time with this girl. I guess that wasn’t so bad.” Eventually, “not so bad” turned into something more, and their relationship officially launched on 09/20/2016 with music, tacos, and swing dancing.

Daniel and Crystal’s ensuing relationship achieved 1 ER visit, 2 perforated eardrums, 3 more years of grad school misery/accomplishments, and countless late nights of playing music in the park. After they both graduated with their doctorate degrees, Daniel and Crystal made a big move up north to Boston, MA for their first big kid jobs. When their 3rd anniversary came around, they made plans to visit Cape Cod (or “the Cod,” as Crystal accidentally calls it).

They headed out to the beach just before sunset with guitar in hand. After a few duets, Daniel serenaded Crystal with an original song. As if that wasn’t romantic enough, he then pulled out their “Adventure Book,” a scrapbook of their relationship. He had added pages for a number of events that had occurred since the scrapbook’s last update. The last page of the book was bare except for a caption, which read “9/21/2019: The day you said ‘yes!’”


The I Do Crew

Casey

Michael

Anna

Nuvan

Jonathan

Jonathan

Joshua

Barbara

Graham

Events

Events



More information coming soon!

Travel

Travel



Lodging

More information coming soon!

Getting Here

George Bush Intercontinental Airport

William P. Hobby Airport

Getting Around

More information coming soon!

Things To Do

More information coming soon!

Registry

Wedding Registry



More information coming soon!

RSVP

Répondez S’il Vous Plaît



Did you know RSVP stood for that?

FAQs

Frequently Asked Questions



1. What is a Vietnamese tea ceremony?

  • The tea ceremony is the traditional wedding ceremony performed in Vietnamese culture. Rather than a set of friends as the bridesmaids and groomsmen, male relatives of the groom and female relatives of the bride take part in the procession. Starting outside, the groomsmen lead this procession, followed by the groom, the groom’s immediate family, and the groom’s extended family. Friends of either the bride or groom are asked to follow after the extended family. The groomsmen bare gifts for the family of the bride; these usually consist of cookies, tea, wine, and fruit. They are welcomed at the threshold by the bridesmaids, who accept the gifts as the procession enters then by the remainder of the bride’s family inside. Once all have entered, the gifts are placed at the altar, and introductions between the families are made. Upon both sets of parents’ agreement for marriage, the bride is escorted to the altar by her mother. The bride and groom then visit each of their parents and grandparents, pouring each of these couples tea while receiving blessings or marital advice in return. This portion of the ceremony is meant to be quite intimate; the guests are usually unable to hear the contents of the blessings and advice. Finally, tea is poured and incense are burned in honor of the bride and groom’s deceased ancestors.

2. What is the recommended attire?

  • For the wedding on Saturday, we recommend semi-formal: ties without tuxes and dresses that don’t necessarily have to be floor length.

  • We recommend “dressy casual” to the tea ceremony: anything a step up from jeans. Also acceptable are Vietnamese ao dai, a traditional Vietnamese style of clothing.

  • However, we hope that you will feel free to come as you are whether that’s jeans or your prom dress!
3. Is any part of the celebration outdoors?
  • Yes, the wedding ceremony and cocktail hour will be held outdoors, barring any inclement weather.

4. Who is Bishop?

  • Since you’ve made it this far you must know the password to this site, so you might be wondering who Bishop is. Bishop is the cutest cat in Boston (and maybe the world). Here he is lying on his cat bed, also known as, “Crystal’s sweaters.”

5. Will Bishop be at the wedding?
  • Unfortunately, not. Bishop is a loving cat that would not last any longer than 5 seconds outdoors.
6. Where can I find parking?
  • The lodging options, tea ceremony church, and wedding venue all have ample parking available for free.
7. Will transportation be provided?
  • This is still TBD, but we are hoping to find transportation to and from the hotel on both evenings for wedding guests!
8. Can I bring a guest or my kids?
  • If their name is on the inner envelope of the invitation, they are most certainly welcome!
9. How should I submit my RSVP?
  • You may RSVP online or by mailing back the RSVP card found in your invitation.






DIY Wedding Blog

A Do It Yourself Wedding Blog



Welcome & How to Host a Website Using flexdashboard and GitHub Pages

10/15/2019

Hello, friends and family!

I am dedicating this blog to all things DIY that Daniel and I work on throughout the wedding planning process. This will include, but may not be limited to, I Do Crew proposals, invitations, gifts, and even the very website you are reading from now. I don’t expect all or even any of you to find this remotely interesting, but maybe you will! At the very least, I wanted to document the neat things we come up with and describe how to do them in case other crafty couples wanted to learn from our successes and our mistakes.

If you didn’t already know, I really love crafting. The process of taking raw materials and creating something appreciable brings me great joy whether it’s baking, wood crafting, or scrapbooking. Until recently, I have always been a busy student without a lot of time available for crafting. However, I now work that wonderful 9-5 and, better yet, have an occassion to take on some really great crafting projects: our engagement!

When we first sat down to discuss the vision of our wedding and what experience we wanted to walk away with, we agreed that we wanted our personality as a couple to really shine through the decisions. Rather than purchasing all of our wedding “stuff,” we figured we could save a few bucks by doing some of it ourselves. Moreover, we could better tailor our products when building our wedding brand to be the same across everything we distribute, starting with our wedding website.

We are, like many other engaged couples, using sites like WeddingWire and theknot in the planning process, but we just weren’t satisfied with the options for creating a wedding website. We couldn’t get the exact colors we wanted on all the website elements, there weren’t a lot of options for fonts, and, most of all, the data format of the guest list and RSVP form were not conducive to analysis. This last point probably sounds really silly, but it was a deal breaker for us.

As a data scientist and research analyst by trade, Daniel and I could not stand the thought of willingly creating a guest list that was not easy to manipulate in data analytic software. With my background in creating flexdashboards in R and Daniel’s experience with collaborative version control in GitHub, we knew there had to be a way to get this done. Now, this is most certainly not the most intuitive way to create a website. It definitely isn’t the easiest (trust me, we did a pretty thorough search for web hosting options through R). Most web developers would use HTML programming, not statistical programming, but it’s what we know!

So, without further ado, how the heck does one create a website using a language not conventional for building a website (rivetting, I know)? First off, I would describe R as a great tool for anyone looking to be a data scientist or analyst. The software is free to download and completely open source, making it an ideal sandbox for data junkies like Daniel and me. More recently, R’s capabilities in making dashboards for data visualization has become quite popular (see here for examples). Some of these kinds of dashboards (flexdashboards) can produce html output, a file format you can easily save and send to others, and it will open and function conveniently for them.

But we want a website: a URL that guests can search for in their browser, not a file we have to email to all of our guests individually! GitHub Pages to the rescue. GitHub is a place where you can practice version control – it’s like the track changes feature on a Google document but for any file that you may be making frequent edits to. GitHub Pages lets you upload the html file you may have, and it will host that file as a functioning website with a domain name of your choosing. Other sites and apps like Google Drive actually let you do this as well, but GitHub is a great, free option when multiple people are working together on the same project.

So we got to work. Daniel picked up some flexdashboard experience, and I got the hang of GitHub. We both had to learn a small amount of HTML programming, but we got this project up and running within a matter of hours. That’s pretty quick as far as collaborative deliverables go!

You may have noticed that our website is password protected. It was important to us to maintain some level of privacy. The free version of GitHub is intended for open access, encouraging collaboration and easy distribution of content and ideas. You can follow these instructions to implement password protection on any website. It was super easy. You basically just have to know how to create and rename a folder, and you’re set.

We still have a ways to go. Not all of our tabs are set up. We’ll need to link our RSVP page to a Google form to collect RSVPs. Who knows if the site will be horribly slow once we add photos to the gallery. Maybe I’ll post an update later as to how it goes. Thus far, it’s been just a really fun, nerdy bonding activity for us.

Again, this was definitely not the most convenient way to create and host a wedding website, but this was absolutely the only way for Daniel and I to go about creating and hosting ours. Not only did it allow for complete customization of the end product, but building our website from the ground up in our preferred programming language has already been the ultimate kick off to our engagement. We both love data and programming in R; why not incorporate that into our wedding? My favorite part of building our website this way is that it is just totally novel. Flexdashboards are typically purposed for displaying visuals for data, not as a media for wedding information, but this challenge was merely an exciting puzzle for two nerds to solve.

That’s all for now. Stay tuned for how-tos, details, tips, and inspiration for DIY wedding projects.